Anti-smoking advisors are going into nurseries for the first time to give children as young as three lectures on the evils of cigarettes.

They are showing them dolls that demonstrate how the lungs of smokers and non-smokers differ, then handing them NHS leaflets and questionnaires to take home for their parents.

Colchester and Tendring NHS Stop Smoking Service in Essex believes it is a good way to get an important health message across, and insists it is done "delicately and tactfully".

Well, of course they do. The fact that they see nothing whatsover wrong with lecturing and hectoring children (of three, for God's sake!) to get at their recalcitrant parents shows exactly what the state thinks of the people who pay its wages.

So far the Essex service has given "pre-school smoking education sessions" at the Kiddi Caru Nursery in Colchester and the Little Pals Neighbourhood Nursery in Clacton-on-Sea.

In addition, it is giving pregnant women £20 in Co-Op vouchers if they stop smoking for a week, another £40 after a month and a further £40 if they give up for a year.

So if you live in Essex and send your kids to those two nurseries, you can expect tears before bedtime should you spark up tonight. And maybe even if you don't smoke, if your kids have had the bejeesus frightened out of them by those dolls that 'demonstrate how the lungs of smokers and non-smokers differ' (wonder if they are made by the same company that makes the 'anatomically correct' dolls so beloved of child abuse witchhunters..?).

Emma Ferdinand, Specialist Stop Smoking Adviser for Young People, said: "More than 40 per cent of children live in a household with at least one smoker and children of smokers are more than twice as likely to start smoking. Our aim is to target parents by providing leaflets via the children on the effects of passive smoking and, as importantly, providing information on how to access the Colchester and Tendring NHS Stop Smoking Service if any parents decide they want to stop smoking."

There's a name for people who target children because they find that adults are too intelligent or too stubborn to fall for their claptrap, Emma.

Still, I'm sure we can expect the usual suspects who whine at McDonald's and Coca-Cola's 'malign influence on children' to be up in arms about this, can't we?

4 comments:

I remember reading an article about the government trying to ban traditional fairy stories because they were too frightening for young children.

That made me angry as most of them are designed to warn or keep our children safe.

Now this same government, take it upon themselves to frighten children to death with this utter bollocks, presumably without parents permission. The utter hypocrisy of this government makes my blood boil.

Classic Righteous behaviour. No tactic is too underhand if it advances their aims. They really do believe that their cause is right.

As for the fairy stories, the government didn't try to ban them because they were too frightening for children (though that was the publicly declared reason). The real reason is the cultural message they gave out - how can a government dismantle a culture if children are immersed in stories extoling that culture?

This has echoes of Pavlik Morozov, the 10-year-old Russian boy, who ratted on his father to the precursor of the KGB. Arrested as an enemy of the state, his father was deported to a gulag where he perished.